As I voted this month, I felt a chill of satisfaction, if I can describe that sensation, honored, grateful and patriotic that I was fulfilling the most important duty an American citizen can perform.

I know that my single vote is important toward the continuation of this greatest government on earth. And I hope that all who read this will also take a moment to be thankful for the freedoms and, yes, the debates, in this great country.

I am also hopeful that winners and losers realize they have a responsibility to exert extra efforts to return harmony to our society.

Whether that can be achieved, particularly on the national level, should worry all Americans. We see every day how the resident in the White House seems to tailor each action to fit his own biases and certainties.

Too often, both political parties seem more intent on getting elected than on cooperating on what this country needs. But, as history and historians constantly remind us, the United States has gone through even more perilous and divisive times, only to have its constitutional form bring us back to an even keel.

I have faith that this will, and must, happen again.

My voting on that second Tuesday of November also made me realize again that this month is undoubtedly my most important of the 12:

November is the month the United States welcomed my mother and me on a Thanksgiving from our flight from the murderous Nazis. Is it any wonder that this will always be my most important holiday, as I give thanks that I escaped and found sanctuary here in Delaware?

In November, 80 years ago, the British Parliament agreed with private organizations to welcome unaccompanied refugee children to England through the Kindertransport. In the following months before Germans started World War II in Europe, about 10,000 children were saved from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. I was one of them.

The Kindertransport program resulted from another November date that lives in infamy: Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht. This day and night of broken glass is more properly in German called Pogromnacht, a pogrom against the Jewish population.

Nazis rampaged day and night, burning synagogues and their holy content, smashing and looting Jewish-owned stores, killing or deporting thousands of Jewish men, beating men, women and children on the streets.

Kristallnacht made it obvious that the many restrictions that the Hitler regime had previously imposed on the Jewish population were just preliminary to what would become the Holocaust and the murder of all with any connection to Judaism or of other unwanted populations.

My parents were able to get me a spot on a January Kindertransport train to Holland and across the English Channel to safety. I cannot imagine what they and all parents must have experienced in saying goodbye to their children. Most of those 10,000 children never saw their parents again.

Our household needed the intervention of a U. S. senator to get a visa to come to this country, but we couldn’t get into the United States immediately under the small quota system then in existence. We first went to live in Cuba, which was still welcoming refugees until the doors suddenly closed soon after we landed.

That policy change sent the passengers on the ship St. Louis, which also then was not allowed to dock in the U.S., back to the killing fields of Europe.

My mother and I spent our first hours in the United States in Miami on the fourth Thursday of November 1939, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just declared would be a “day of general Thanksgiving.” My father arrived months later.

No wonder I celebrate November and Thanksgiving and think about my narrow escape, about family members who died and about those who today are also trying to escape danger.